Monkey hate CSS.

[gement]

So, it's not *exactly* procrastinating if I have a class that talks a little about the subject, right? The following is written in pidgin-Geek with english translations at the end of every paragraph.

I'm trying to make a sexy CSS website. I had a beautiful, elegant, simple, scalable vision of what I want it to look like. I know I've seen sites do it. I can't find a template that explains how, and I got it to do it in Firefox but not in IE, but then in trying to make it work in IE I learned some better principles and when I try to do it with the better principles in place I can't make the Firefox work anymore either. I had a picture in my head that turned out to be surprisingly difficult to make happen.

So I finally found a template that I'm not totally thrilled with, but it's close enough to practice on and see how well I can tweak it to my purpose. I've spent several happy hours doing that. Then when I was fiddling with the column colors, I discovered that one of the column lengths Didn't Work in Firefox. If the left column was longer, it just spilled right off the page. Debugging time! I was playing with a sample and something broke.

I'm a smart kid, I had all the original templates there, so I started putting in the original pieces one at a time to figure out which one had broken. After trying all SIX of the attached style sheet bits, I determined that I'd broken something in the original html file. So I started testing one tiny modification at a time between the original and my new version, reloading for every single little change. Do you know what it was? Do you? I spent a long time looking for what broke.

I had put a comment in the file before the DOCTYPE declaration. That was the only problem. Some legally constructed comments and a couple of carriage returns. Firefox choked on it in tiny specific ways, but not big enough ways for me to discover until several hours after I had made the change. Tiny, weird little stuff, not picking up one of the two linked style sheets, making the left column (but not the right!) overflow if it's the longer one... Crazy, maddening, and I never would have known. It makes me wonder what little syntax details messed up my menu design in the first place, and if they'd be fixed by a proper DOCTYPE declaration, or possibly by wearing my underwear on my head while coding. It was really, really, really, really stupid.

At this point I am willing to concede that I could use some debugging help on my original concept from someone who actually likes doing this and knows where all the stupid semicolons go. This is why I didn't take more than two programming classes. At least in those the parser wouldn't choke on legal comments. MONKEY HATE CSS.

Comments

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

XML is actually really weird, at a formal level. I'm fairly certain that the doctype must be the first thing in the file, and that comments are only valid after at least it, and possible after the html tag; Firefox was probably registering this, and throwing you into "quirks" mode, the rendering model used for possibly broken or noncompliant html.

Yes, it sucks. I hate the web too.

[eeyorerin]

Poor monkey. If it makes you feel any better, every single Web worker out there has endured that, and I always swear and throw things. And I just spent an hour and a half with twenty five students trying to do the exact same thing you're doing, and there was much with the gnashing and the wailing. (But whyyyyyyyy is it breaking, Dr. Penguin?)

Helpful thing: Firefox's Web Developer extension (requires grease monkey) will help you find those things. I will also be a helpful monkey if you would like.

[adularia.livejournal.com]

Offering to help, too, though eeyorerin is likely even better than I am at CSS.

[tithonium.livejournal.com]

I've got a couple books you might find useful. I'll try to drop them by some time when it's possible to cross the city in less than 5 hours.

[pamc.livejournal.com]

Do you have any of the O'Reilly series? They're an awesome reference for browser specific stuff.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I have the Koala book (HTML and XHTML, the Definitive Guide), but none of the others. I'm just stymied by these dumb, dumb, dumb things, like don't put comments before the DOCTYPE. Hell, on the one I was writing from scratch, I hadn't declared a doctype! That wasn't really on the list in the important must-do items in my book. Grrr.

[hello-mike.livejournal.com]

I enjoy nearly everything about web development more than I enjoy trying to make a beautiful layout actually work in CSS. This pain is almost entirely caused by the existence of IE. I hate Internet Explorer so much now that it's difficult for me to convey in human-readable text. It sucks. It sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks it sucks.

I feel your pain.

If you'd ever like me to take a look at anything, since that's, in a nutshell, been a very large part of my gainful employment for the past six years, e-mail me, I can go through it and try to make it pretty for you. I am apparently good at that.

But, yeah, layouting sucks.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

You have checked out the Firefox Web Developer toolbar, I hope? :) It's got a lot of useful things there, for CSS, layout, and many many more...

[dymaxion.livejournal.com]

On another note, the CSS and HTML validators from the W3C are (sometimes) your friends -- their errors can be opaque, and they won't fix "but IE doesn't work right!", but they are good at pointing out the "hey, wait, something's weird" things.

[annissamazing]

That same thing happened to me too! Ha!

I loved CSS when I got the hang of it. Then I was told that I couldn't use it anymore because it messed with the web tracking software.

Ruh!

[capnexposition.livejournal.com]

When I read the subject line, I totally flinched, seeing as my department's (acronym) title is CSS. I immediately thought, "oh god, who did something stupid to the I-School??". But yeah. I'm glad we didn't do anything to piss you off, and I'm sorry your web design did not pan out as originally planned. I'd offer some assistance, but I am an utter n00b when it comes to web design. I can barely manage basic HTML.

PS, I hope you didn't try coding with your underwear on your head, because then you would have accidentally turned your computer into a beautiful woman with horrible 80s hair who would have made your life all exciting and fantasy-like. And that'd be really hard to explain in an LJ post. (+50 DKP for 80s movie references!)